His gifts in characterization can easily be underrated. Defoe always
     admires the merchant, and his heroes are always adding up their financial profits, frequently
     for Defoe's delight rather than for the reader's pleasure.

     He lacks well-Knit strucrure; several of his stories show a break  near the middle which might
     suggest that Defoe has for the moment run out of adventures, and presently must open a new
     vein. When Crusoe has stablished his economy, there is a pause; then the footprint is seen,
     Friday is introduced, and we can observe education impressing the blank sheet which is the
     mind of the man of Nature.
 

                         In pattern, his narratives are fictional  autobiographies always pretending to be
     "true" stories, and so cleverly aunthenticated with fictional detail that it is at times difficult to
     believe that they have no basis in actuality.
     In general Defoe's sense of the passing of time in a story is vague and poor. Crusoe's
     adventures and Moll Flanders' love affairs drift on through an excessive number of years.

     The relation of Defoe's narratives to the tradition of the English novel has been debated. He has been   regarded as following the picaresque type of fiction, and if the word picarsque is loosely used. Defoe wrote rogue biography than the true picaresque. There the tradition as formulated required biographical pattern, episodic structure with the protagonist living by his wits and passing from one social stratum to another from one professional class to another, the object of the change being diversified social expose or satire.

defoe's traditions are clearly those of biography, voyage literature, and the moral treatise. He lacks power over domestic emotions, and these were to be the stock in trade of the sentimentalists; but his gifts are more basically sound than many of theirs, and his influence will endure as long as theirs. He is perhaps more realistic than many of them are; but he never seems to worry about conscientious fabrication of real life: he is like the truly natural storyteller, content to create elaborate illusions of reality